


Run into the Sea

by ponderinfrustration



Series: Delta [2]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Western, F/M, M/M, Major Illness, Miscarriage, Multi, Polyamory, Prostitution, period-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-19 18:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19361833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: Erik roams the West and plays music and has two great loves in his life, and the greatest thing is that he loves them both at once, and they each love him all the more for it.





	1. 1

His parents call him Erique, but both of his parents die within four months of each other when he is seventeen. Consumption, and somehow he escapes it. It will be the first of many things he escapes, and most of them will be nooses and other men. (Or bullets, or knives.)

They gave him a name, and half a face. (His mother confessed as she lay dying that she never understood how his deformity happened, but she always felt guilty over it, and never believed it was sent as a punishment or as a marker of inherent evil, and she told him to keep it covered up, because men would not understand, but that bit he realized long ago himself.) They gave him the skills to play and tune pianos, left him sheet music and excellent cravats. The cravats he kept. The sheet music and the piano he sold to pay for medicine for both of them. But there is nothing that kills consumption, only things that kill the pain of it, and most of the money he gained he spent on whiskey and laudanum so they might be able sleep while he played in poky bars.

(His father taught him Latin and Greek and mathematics because while his father was a musician he had a classical education once and he never had much to give his son but he could give him that.)

His mother died first.

He will never forget how his father, ill and weak as he was, wept, and insisted on attending her funeral.

It was there he caught the pneumonia that put him to bed for good.

There is nothing left for him, only memories he would rather forget. So he sells the last of the books, takes what money he’s earned that isn’t needed for other expenses, and buys a good horse.

And a gun.

It will the first of many.

* * *

 

He kills two men in New Orleans in a filthy alleyway. And immediately heaves up the coffee that was all he had all evening. He is seventeen and a hired killer and his mother’s words about his not being inherently evil seem very far away.

He gathers himself and runs.

He runs so fast he forgets to collect the money due him. He forgets the cravats his father left him. He simply mounts his horse and rides out, and rides hard all night to put as much distance between the town and him.

It is the first and the last killing job he will ever take.

* * *

 

He is not sure where it is, only that it is six weeks away from New Orleans, and he learns the lesson that he need not kill for money. There are people willing to pay to hear him play. And people willing to pay to lose at cards. His hands have always been lightning fast, and not just at racing across piano keys.

He learns, too, that there are men willing to pay for the attentions of another man. Even one who is little more than a boy. Even one with only half a face.

(They think he is being mysterious with his mask. And then they think they are better than other men, for being brave enough to pay for his attentions.)

His hands are good for that too.

* * *

 

He is taller than most men — taller than any man he has ever come across — but he is just as thin as his father was before illness left him gaunt, and there are men willing to pay him to ride their horses for them to win races.

He rides in five races in one day and can barely walk by the end of it for the pains in his thighs. (Riding all day and night to get there was not his finest idea.) But by the end of it he has a thousand dollars that he didn’t have to start, and he settles on New York.

There is bound to be music in New York.

* * *

 

In New York he finds men willing to teach him about music, about opera and French and German and Italian and Spanish, for a price that is different from money.

He tells him his face was the result of a fire.

On the day he turns twenty, he takes to the stage.

He is lost in the background, his mask adorned with feathers and gold, but he sings out to the gods of music and his heart pounds deep in his chest and he’s breathless at the end but it’s the most magical moment of his life.

That one night leads to more. No starring roles, but several supporting ones. He always favored the piano over singing but he sings in New York, in Boston, and Richmond, and Atlanta. He drinks fancy wines and wears elegant clothes and trades on the mystique of his mask, and loses hundreds of dollars at cards when his eyes are slower than his hands, then packs in cards and entertains notions of going to France, to Spain, and Italy. There is a tenor he kisses one dark night, having kissed several before and enjoyed it, but this time he misinterprets the signs.

In the morning he flees for Canada, with aching ribs and a bruised face and lungs that are too bruised to expand fully.

It is April, and he is twenty-two.

* * *

 

He speaks French and plays piano to fur-trappers and gold-seekers and keeps his voice to himself. Canada is cold and inhospitable and he feels very young and very alone. It is so long since he felt either of those things that he’s not sure what to do with himself.

He avoids beautiful men.

He sleeps with a métis girl who wears her inky black hair in braids that he twines with his fingers. Her kisses are the realest thing he has felt in so very long, and his skin burns beneath her touch.

A terrible fever sweeps through the camp and she kisses him and bathes his head and wraps him safe in blankets but behind his eyes fires rage and she coughs blood again and again. He wakes too weak to move, too weak to speak, his knuckles aching stiff and hears music far away, the colors washed out of the world so it is a pale imitation of itself. She kisses him and whispers she is sorry and there are voices and shouting.

Her lips linger a moment on his as his eyes slip closed.

When he wakes again, he is alone.

* * *

 

He returns to America in the spring of 1861, hollow and exhausted and still frail from his illness, in time for the war to break out. He is not a soldier. And yes he killed those men in New Orleans but that is almost seven years gone. He is not a killer. The quarrels of states are intangible things that seem to waltz around a hundred different points circling and biting at each other, and he is too tired for it all, too tired to watch men die when they won’t talk about slavery and instead insist that the whole thing is over the right to do as they please.

All he wants is to make music.

If he stays, someone will force him to fight, and they’ll do their best to tear the music from him.

He is sick to his stomach with the whole lot of them.

He saddles a good horse, and rides for Mexico.

* * *

 

South of the border, they call him Enrique, and he likes the way it rolls on their tongues. He is tired of being Erique, and being someone else for a while sounds like a good idea.

The Spanish they speak is different from the Spanish of operas. Their music is sprung from the people and not written for the world to see. He had feared they might be a superstitious people, but they understand a man who lives only for how the notes fit together. He plays their guitars and fixes a half-broken fiddle and where there are pianos in the cantinas he sits and plays all night as he drinks their mezcal and tequila and they dance around him.

His reputation precedes him and they invite him to play at their weddings and funerals, at their baptisms and fiestas. The music flies from his fingertips and he laughs to see the joy on their faces that he has brought and sometimes they pull him to his feet and he dances with them while someone else plays instead. He always has a bed or a floor to sleep on and food if he wants it and drink if he needs it and the dons invite him to play at their celebrations, and the vaqueros like when he sits at their campfires and plays the guitar someone will always have to hand.

No one forces him to touch them for the sake of their pesos, and if they invite him to their bed it is because they want him and not merely to be able to say they had him. He spends weeks with a young widow and entertains her children with his songs until it is time for him to move on again, and then there is a vaquero with melancholy writ large on his face who touches him with callused hands.

He is the first man he has lain with since New York and he does not beat him for misunderstanding because there is nothing to misunderstand.

It is, he fancies, the happiest he has ever been in his whole life.

* * *

 

It is the summer of 1862 that he meets Emir.

Emir is not the first soldier he meets who has deserted an army, either Union or Confederate, but his uniform is blue where it is not brown with mud or black with blood (none of it Emir’s own). Emir’s eyes are red-rimmed and the lightning that flashes when he stumbles into the cantina seems like some sort of a sign.

It is the first time Enrique has cause to speak something only than the language of the people in nearly a year and a half.

Emir calls him Erik, and it fits better than any other name he has ever worn.

They do not speak much that night. He is playing to the crowd taking shelter from the storm, the oil lamps casting the room half into shadow, and he has been drinking tequila since sometime around noon. His fingers are loose with it and he hits all the wrong notes and keeps giggling over the keys but no one seems to notice, everyone happy simply to be alive. He looks up as the door closes and something jolts deep inside of him when he meets emerald eyes looking out from a dark stubbled face, and he scrambles to regain where he was in the piece.

Someone brings Emir tequila and beans and he looks as if he’s on the point of tears as he comes to sit beside the piano.

Erik stretches out and squeezes his fingers, and in that moment they gain their names.

* * *

 

Emir is still there in the morning, when Erik wakes on the table where he wrapped himself up for the night. The storm has long passed, the sky clear blue, and someone has found Emir a change of clothes, and a mirror to shave with. He is handsome and young, so young, and Erik is only twenty-five but he has never felt so old as when he looks at this boy who has deserted the army.

He plays him any music he likes, and Emir disappears for long hours of the afternoon and night. Later, Erik will learn that he was seeking comfort in the arms of a young woman, but by then such things will have ceased to matter.

The hollowness that takes up residence inside his chest in those hours that Emir is away is an unfamiliar beast.

He plays all through the next day, then relinquishes the piano to whoever wishes it, and decides to walk beneath the stars.

The stars have always been soothing to him, ever since he was a boy.

The smell of flowers and grass and trees is heady and intoxicating after the heat of the day.

Emir falls into step beside them.

Whichever of them makes the first move, he will never be able to remember. But he turns to Emir, or maybe Emir turns to him, and the first kiss they share is sweet, and right.

They lie together that night, and every night after, and the agreement that they will see out the war together is silent but such things do not need to be spoken.

* * *

 

Emir’s hands are gentle on his hips, his fingertips light tracing his skin, tracing scars (of bullets that barely caught him, of knives that he danced away from; he has escaped many things and the war is only one of them). His voice is soft, murmuring the languages of the east lands, and Erik swallows every word of them, breathes them into the darkness in answer, and Emir’s tongue is the sweetest one in the world.

He kisses Emir’s hair as the stars twinkle down at them, and smiles as he drifts into sleep.

* * *

 

It is August 1865 before word reaches them that the Confederacy has surrendered. They are in Southern Mexico, Erik’s pale skin golden brown with the sun. They sleep by day wrapped in each other’s arms, at night play cards and chess and the piano for money, drink too much mezcal and tequila. They have worked as vaqueros and as lawmen and musicians, have broken horses and briefly kept their own cantina and the war is so far away they have forgotten what it was they were running from.

Returning to Texas is a long process of drifting, and making love beneath the stars. They live for a time among the Yaqui, and later the Lipan Apache. Erik collects rings the way some men collect broken hearts, wearing several on each finger and always with more ready to trade. He wears turquoise in his ears and Emir grins at him and tells him he is the most handsome man he has ever met.

Erik does not wear a mask.

The skin of the distorted half of his face is just as brown as the whole half.

When he sees his reflection in rippling rivers, his eyes are more golden than the sun.

Emir walks like the Persian prince he might have been in another life, and Erik loves him all the more for it.

They swim in rivers and make love to each other in the water, and on riverbanks, the sand sticking to their bare skin.

Even after three years (and more) of loving each other, Emir’s touch goes straight to his heart.

He has never loved anyone more than he loves him.

* * *

 

Why they part upon crossing the border is something they never discuss. It is not something they even quite understand. But they kiss, and Emir rides east, while Erik goes west. There is no resentment in his heart, no hatred. Nothing that might explain it. Even now he is filled with a great love for Emir, but part they do and parting feels natural. It is the way of all things, beginnings and endings, and nothing is made to last forever, and if they are to meet again then it is because nature and time dictated it, and that is better than their trying to remain unchanging.

The seasons come and go, summer to autumn to winter to spring to summer again, and Emir lives within his heart, and even in his absence, Erik’s music is for him.

* * *

 

He drifts from town to town, playing piano and cards and smoking opium. Opium is something he comes to accidentally, and he enjoys the way it makes his limbs feel disconnected, how he dreams of Emir and Mexico, and the music that comes to him and weaves its way through his thoughts as he lies caught in its haze. It is warm, and safe, and Emir was warm and safe too.

He meets Emir…somewhere. It might be Texas. It might be Kansas, or Arkansas, or anywhere. He is not very good at keeping track of time, when the music is in his mind and the smoke in his lungs.  But he meets Emir, and Emir’s eyes are green and soft and sad like the notes he plays as the opium wears off, and he kisses him and cries.

He does not know why he is crying, only that Emir is here and the tears come unbidden and he has never been a religious man (he renounced religion in 1854, somewhere between when his mother died and his father followed her), but God he loves Emir and it is two years since they parted at the border but he is still just as beautiful.

Emir takes him to bed and kisses him and holds him as he cries and somewhere in the darkness he promises not to touch the sweet fumes again.

Emir’s kisses are more gentle after that.

The nightmares that come are terrible, awash with blood and heat, the music discordant and broken. His insides writhe and burn, his skin itches with a thousand spiders, he swims in his own sweat, but Emir is there through it all, whispering to him and kissing him and promising him he will be well, he will get through this, he just needs to breathe and keep looking into his eyes, his eyes, those eyes of deep green ink that flow on and on and on.

He sleeps a long time, after, but Emir is there when he wakes with a clear head, and the face he sees in the mirror is as gaunt and sickly as a ghost.

* * *

 

They stay close to each other for the next year, and when at last they do part it is because Emir has decided to join a trail drive, and Erik has no desire to risk damage to his hands.

It is peaceful, and they know, now, that they will meet again.

* * *

 

They pass the next years in the same way, falling together, falling apart. No matter how long falls in between, each time they find each other is as sweet and wondrous as the first. Emir still makes him giggle like that first night in Mexico in the thunderstorm. He can still make Emir gasp with his touch beneath the stars. There is never any resentment, only love, and space, and time, and closeness.

1871, turns to 1872, to 1873, ’74, 75…like leaves falling away from the trees. They meet and are happy, they part and are happier to meet again. He plays music in Emir’s absence and in his presence and once or twice they dance while other people play. He grows his hair long then cuts it short. He wears emeralds in his ears instead of turquoise then stops wearing anything in them at all and wears more rings instead, collects cufflinks and stickpins and elegant cravats. He smokes cigars and drinks whiskey and lives, for a brief time, amongst the Chiricahua. He finds Emir in a dozen different places, and each time Emir’s fond smile sends a thrill through him.

* * *

 

It is 1876 when he begins to suspect something is not quite right. His clothes hang looser and he has to have his best suits re-tailored. He develops a persistent cough, but that must be the cigars. He has trouble sleeping at night with the sweat that pours through his skin and sometimes the cold is terrible, deep in his bones even as the sweat leaves his clothes damp.

He is mildly breathless after simple things, and that is what troubles him most.

For the first time in his life, he willingly submits himself to a doctor’s examination, and the man’s murmurs of crepitation in the lungs and tidal fever clench his heart in an icy grip.

Consumption.

He lies in his bed in the boardinghouse, looking up at the ceiling, and thinks of Emir.

* * *

 

And so he finds himself in Dodge, where Emir had said he was going. It is the first time he willingly goes looking for him instead of leaving their meetings to fate, and the first time Emir looks at him, freshly arrived in town, he can see in his eyes that he knows there’s something wrong.

“You look like shit,” are the first words in that voice he knows so well, and his throat tightens.

“I feel it,” he whispers, and Emir nods.

He is thirty-nine, and he is going to die slowly, and all he wants is to spend what time he has with the man he loves.

(He does not factor in that he is also going to love a woman, because he does not know that at this point, but in a year he will save Christine from a man who will accost her, and he will sit her down on his piano bench and something will click inside of him, some knowledge that as he is made for Emir he is made for her too, and he will love her instantly with a desperate fierceness, but that lies still in his future, now).


	2. 2

He stays in Dodge. He plays piano and loves Emir. At the New Year celebrations, he places first in the sharp shooting. He doesn’t catch pneumonia, but he does catch a terrible cold that lives in his chest for weeks and reminds him that this is how his life is going to be now — periods of wellness for a time, periods of illness that take longer and longer to recover from until someday he doesn’t, until someday he is just ill, and whether it is a haemorrhage or pneumonia that finishes him doesn’t matter very much.

He wakes in the morning and coughs to clear his chest. And keeps coughing when that fails to do it. Tiredness is never far away. Whiskey deadens the aching pain in his chest. Sneezing is a whole new agony, and one he does his best to avoid.

If he laughs too hard he coughs and the pain is unbearable but he laughs anyway, when he can.

The summer comes. The town swells. The trail herds and their cowhands with their terrible taste in music. If he has to hear Yellow Rose of Texas one more time it won’t be just his lungs bleeding.

He plays Chopin in the small hours and feels a strange kinship with the musician. He wonders if he, too, found himself exhausted in the face of the world.

Everything he plays of his own has an odd thread of melancholy through it, even though he does not feel melancholy at his own situation. It is the way of all things. Beginnings and endings, and illness between, and if it was to be anything he supposes it only natural that it be this.

What makes him melancholy is the thought of leaving Emir, and never being able to return.

He is in the saloon, pondering idly on the eventual manner of his death, when a cowhand accosts a lady who is very pretty and very young, at least to his eyes. There are many injustices in a town like Dodge that he can do nothing about, but he can save a girl from her drunken attacker.

The pain in his chest recedes as he stands from the piano, ignoring the stiffness in his bones. He pulls the man off the girl and pushes him out the door and isn’t quite sure what he says only that he turns around and the girl is staring at him, pale and frightened, and he does what is only the decent thing to do.

He takes her hand, and leads her to his piano bench, and dabs the tears from her eyes. He fills her a glass of whiskey from the bottle he has been nursing all day. He sits beside her, and urges her to drink it slowly, and invites her to tell him her name.

Christine

He smiles at her. “You may call me Erik.” And the notes he plays ring out beautiful and clear.

* * *

 

He walks her home, such as home is for her, living in shared quarters with several other girls who have found themselves in a similar situation to her. Her hands were made for piano keys and something about the whole business strikes him as wrong, that she should be willing to sell her body when she could be selling her skills, but he can’t quite phrase it. It sits too heavy in the back of his mind.

What he does, instead, is brush his lips against her forehead, and invite her to lunch the next day, at Delmonicos.

By then he will know what to say to her. By then the strange fluttering in his heart will have begun to resolve itself into a shape of love. It is not in his power to protect much of anything, but he can protect her from men willing to use her to their own advantage.

She agrees to join him, and her smile is shy and uncertain. He kisses her fingers as he relinquishes her hand, and tips his hat to her, _good night_.

* * *

 

Emir is waiting for him in bed, when he gets back to their own quarters. The gas light is turned down low, and he eases himself out of his coat, and his waistcoat, takes off his boots and unbuckles his belt, deposits his rings on the bedside table, and his mask, hangs his hat on the back of the door beside Emir’s. He winds his watch, and puts it with his rings.

Emir turns to him as he slips between the sheets, and he draws his lover into his arms, breathes in the warm scent of him, and Emir’s kiss is gentle.

“You’re fond of her,” his voice is soft in the darkness, and it is not a question.

“She could be a remarkable pianist.” She has the reach for it, certainty, and showed a memory for music when she could name the notes and keys by the end of the night, and there is just the right pressure in her fingertips, not too hard, not too soft.

“Erik.” Emir is smiling. “I think you like her for more than just her potential skills. And if you wanted to do something about it, I wouldn’t mind.”

Well. There’s a thought. He can’t say it’s not appealing but… “She’s half my age.” True it’s not something that would trouble most men, but most men don’t have someone like Emir.

“I wouldn’t think that matters much to her.” There is a knowingness in Emir’s eyes. “All I’m saying is, if you want to, you can.”

* * *

 

He takes Christine to lunch, and something about Emir’s words echo in the back of his mind. _If you want to, you can_. He wants to, and he doesn’t want to lose Emir. But Emir didn’t seem to have any problem with the idea of his having additional involvement.

She smiles at him across the table, and his heart kicks in his chest.

He wants to very much.

The arrangement he proposes, that day at lunch, pertains only to her piano lessons. That she will never have to sell herself, will never have to entertain men with her body, be it through dancing or other means. He will pay for her room, and anything she might need, and in turn she will put all of her attentions into the piano, to learning the feel of the notes, and how they fit together.

He has more than enough money, with his playing, and his cards, to help her.

She agrees, and kisses him on the mouth. Her cheeks flush a delicate rose as she pulls back, and the thing inside of him that has been about to click since he first sat her down and dabbed the tears from her face finally clicks into place.

 _To hell with it,_ he says to himself, and reaches across the table, and kisses her.

Warmth blooms beneath his ribs, and he smiles into her mouth.

* * *

 

The first time he lies with her is two nights later. She has taken a small private room for herself, and after her lesson she sits beside him as he plays, her shoulder warm brushing his, and his fingers very nearly falter on the keys. Someone pays him to play Beethoven’s Emperor, and she sways with the music so that he wants to stand and dance with her but there is no one else to play so he contents himself with smiling and kissing her cheek as his fingers dance the arpeggio.

He walks her back to her room, and she blushes, just a little, as she invites him up for a drink. She knows about his illness, and how the whiskey warms his chest, and how it helps him to rest a bit before he walks to the room he shares with Emir. And so he agrees, and takes his time as he climbs the steps because if there is anything that strains his chest it is steps, and she takes his coat when he reaches her door.

One drink becomes two. And two drinks becomes a kiss, and her tongue is soft and sweet, her fingers gentle on the back of his neck, gentle opening the buttons of his shirt, and she lays him down on her bed, and kisses him again.

He pulls back, looking deep into her blue eyes, as blue as the sky at dawn, and whispers, “you know I am involved with Emir.”

Her lips twitch, and she nods. “I suspected as much. But if you want to…”

He kisses her and whispers, “If you have no problem with it.”

She smiles, and her hands caress him, and it is, altogether, a very lovely night indeed.

* * *

 

Emir is just pinning his deputy’s badge to his shirt when Erik arrives home the next morning, tired but happy, happy down to his bones, his heart aching with love. Love for Emir, and love for Christine both, so much of it he is not sure how his heart has room to contain it all.

He grins at Emir and kisses him and Emir laughs.

“There was additional involvement, I presume?”

“You presume correct.” He lies down and stretches the creaks from his bones, and Emir kisses him.

“If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

* * *

 

The arrangement is easy, and satisfying, and all he never knew he needed. Emir and Christine become almost instant friends, and Christine’s piano playing comes on by leaps and bounds. By the time summer turns to autumn to winter again and Emir is relieved of his deputy duties as the town falls quiet, he is very happy indeed.

Then he catches a cold that goes straight to his chest and is dangerously close to pneumonia. He is sick for days, for weeks, too sick to go down to the saloons, to seek out music.

It is the first time he coughs blood and the taste of it is iron and heavy in his throat.

Lying in bed that night, it is the first time that Christine comes to him in his own room.

He knows Emir asked her to, and love for Emir rushes through him, and love for Christine too. She lies down at his side, and wraps her arms around him, and sick as he is, and with Emir at his other  side, he does not feel so very ill at all.

* * *

 

In the spring they prevail upon him to leave Dodge. Kansas winters are no good for his lungs (though he suspects winter anywhere isn’t much good for lungs) and so he gives into them, and together they set out to go anywhere.

It is strange traveling with Christine, strange solely for being different. He has never travelled with a woman before though he has stayed with several of them through the years, and there is something about having her there that he finds he likes a great deal. Maybe it is her laugh. Maybe it is her enthusiasm. Maybe it the sun shining golden on her hair.

Maybe it is just because it is Christine, and he loves her.

She wears men’s clothes and keeps her long hair in a plait, and every morning he wakes to a kiss from her and a kiss from Emir together.

The first week is difficult on his bones, but he soon settles into the rhythm of travel, and his lungs do not feel as congested as they did.

If he was a man given to delusions, he might think he can beat his disease. But he has never been given to delusions, and he is happy just to have relief.

They travel through towns big and small, never staying long. Christine resumes her lessons wherever they find a piano, and he and Emir together teach her to shoot. They swim in rivers, and he lies on riverbanks to dry off beneath the sun. His skin burns, and then it peels, and both Emir and Christine are very gentle with him.

He never wears a mask.

* * *

 

In Fort Griffin he meets a dentist with a persistent cough that sounds familiar. He relieves the man of five hundred dollars over cards, and though he would never presume to be knowledgeable about another man’s illness, he counsels him against his original plan of going to Dodge.

“The town is full of trouble,” he says, but it’s only three-quarters true. He’s sure there are plenty of worse towns, and Emir never got hurt keeping the peace.

At least, nothing worse than a few bruises.

The dentist is as persistent as his cough, and it is not Erik’s place to interfere.

* * *

 

  1. Las Vegas, New Mexico.



They came for the hot springs, supposed to bring great relief to consumptives. The waters did for a while, especially after coming through a difficult winter when pneumonia came close to doing for him.

He left because someone shot Emir, and he killed the man who tried to kill the best man in the world.

He doesn’t remember, after, much of what happened. Only that the world had narrowed down to the single point of Jim Latimer before him and the knowledge that Emir was in their bed possibly dying of an infected bullet wound. The gun jumped twice in his hand and someone grabbed him.

He comes back to himself behind bars, with tears in his eyes and his chest heaving and blood in his mouth and he can’t get his breath, can’t get his breath and Emir is dying and he’s just killed a man and they’ll kill him for it and Christine will be left alone—

And then Christine is before him, her eyes rimmed red and face so pale, and the cuffs fall from his wrists as she kisses him.

“Get somewhere safe,” she whispers, “get somewhere safe and we’ll find you when he’s well.”

She presses the reins of a stolen horse into his hand and gives him his own gunbelt, and she has never looked so beautiful as in this moment.

There is a terrible lump in his throat.

“Be careful,” he whispers and those two words contain everything, that he loves her and he loves Emir and he needs them both to be well and he’ll do what he can to keep himself well to get back to them.

Then he mounts the stolen horse, and rides as if hell itself is after him.

* * *

 

He has been alone many times, both before and after he met Emir. It was, for so long, the nature of his being. But he has never been alone since he returned himself to Emir in Dodge, and he has never felt so lost.

It is two weeks before he gets far enough away that he feels safe to find a town and send a wire.

By the time he finds a town, there is so much blood in his mouth that he collapses off his horse, and comes back to himself in a doctor’s room.

Christine had packed money for him, and his spare rings, and as soon he gets his breath, he has the doctor send a coded wire (from Enrique, not Erik) to Las Vegas.

Christine’s return wire tells him that Emir’s fever has broken, and he is recovering.

He weeps with relief, and sleeps for three days.

* * *

 

The three months he is without Christine and Emir are the worst of his life and for the rest of his life he will do his best to forget them.

(When they find him, Emir is still pale and frail. Christine is exhausted from having brought him cross-country and looked after him. Erik pulls them both into his arms, and kisses them, and puts them to bed.)

* * *

 

In Tucson he suffers his first bad haemorrhage. And his second. He almost dies three times (by Emir’s count) and when he finally does come back to himself, he remembers little, except for a vague feeling of not having felt very much of anything at all.

And the knowledge that something had happened to Christine.

(Emir never tells him the full truth of things. Of how his pulse grew so weak one night, so faint, how he was so pale his lips were blue and his breath rattled in his throat and there was blood on his lips even when he didn’t cough. How Emir had sat there cradled his fingers to his lips and whispering every prayer he ever knew and singing half-broken songs even though he was never a singer. How, for a terrible thirty-six hours, he thought he might have to plan two funerals. There are many things Emir never tells Erik, and most of them are from Tucson.)

Christine is there when he wakes the first time that he can remember (though he woke many times before that, still feverish, and didn’t say much of anything because he didn’t see much of anything, and much of what he saw was dreams), and there is something terribly frail about her that goes straight to his heart.

He is too tired to ask her, that time. But he whispers her name and tears fill her eyes as she calls for Emir. It takes all the strength he has to turn his head to the door and then Emir is there, flushed and breathless and whispering his name. Christine kisses the corner of his mouth, and Emir kisses his forehead, and some unknowable thing passes between the two of them that he is too tired to try to understand.

* * *

 

He is still confined to bed, weeks later, when Christine tells him about the baby.

It is evening. Emir is…somewhere, when she comes to him, and settles on the edge of the bed. There is something inscrutable in her eyes as she takes his hand.

“I have something to tell you,” she whispers, and he swallows, because never can a phrase like that be a harbinger of good news.

“What is it?” his voice is hoarse with healing ulcers in his throat, but she kisses his fingers and the story comes out. About the baby. About how she had not known she was expecting, it was too early. How he suffered a second haemorrhage two days after the first, and in the middle of it she got a terrible pain, and collapsed. And lost the baby she did not know she was carrying.

(She leaves out the part that she almost bled to death, because she does not want to frighten him.)

Her words leave him stunned, and all he can do is draw her into his arms, and ease her head down onto his shoulder.

Her tears soak his shirt.

His tears blur the room around him.

A baby.

There was going to be a baby.

His baby.

He could have been a father. He could’ve…

“Oh, Christine,” he whispers, and kisses her hair.

What possesses him he doesn’t know. He doesn’t have the breath for such things. It is twenty-one years since he left New York, since he last sung for anyone to hear, and he is not a young man anymore, or a well one. But he swallows against the pain in his throat and sings, softly, an old song his mother once sang to him.

It is only a few notes, a few bars, but Christine’s voice joins his, hoarse with her tears, and when his dies hers carries on and finishes the song, and he holds her tighter, and she kisses his neck, and they lie like that for a long time, until sleep takes him.

He dreams, that night, of singing on a stage. The first time he has dreamt such a thing. And Christine is beside him, her voice ringing out like the soprano she might have been, and when they turn to each other, and finish, he bows his head for to kiss her, but there is a giggle that he turns around to face and a tiny boy throws himself into his arms, a tiny boy with a whole face and golden curls, and hazel eyes.

The boy throws his arms around him, and buries his face in his neck.

He wakes from the dream with fresh tears in his eyes.

(In time, he will come to think it is best there was no child. He could not bear to love a tiny son or daughter, and then be forced to leave them when his illness some day takes him. For his child to have to grow up without him. And he does not doubt that Christine would be a wonderful mother, and that Emir would be the best father in the world, but he should be there for his child, he should be there.)

(For all that he will someday think it best that there was no child, part of him will always wonder what might have been, and wish that there had been a baby. Convincing himself of fallacies is the easiest way he knows to keep the pain at bay.)


	3. 3

Recovering from his haemorrhage is an ordeal he would not wish on anyone. He is forced to use a cane while he regains the strength of his legs, and the first thing he vows is to get strong enough to get rid of that.

The second thing he vows is to get strong enough to ride out of town.

He is frequently cold, with the loss of blood and body mass, and Christine fusses over him every morning to make sure he’s dressed warmly. After everything that’s happened, he lets her.

She takes his arm for his morning stroll, and it is an indignity that he can only make it a few hundred yards before feeling faint. He goes back to their room to rest, and Emir rubs warm oils into his aching muscles as he promises himself he’ll go a little further the next morning.

The first time he makes it to a saloon, he sits a long time before he turns to the piano.

The notes he plays have been waiting in his fingers for weeks, months, ever since Christine told him about the baby.

(He will only ever play the piece a few times, but Christine will learn it by ear and take it into her heart, and someday, eight years from now, she will find herself playing it rather a lot.)

Eventually he is deemed fit enough to sit on his horse. The mornings are cold now, but he takes short rides with Emir and Christine at his side, and Emir dictates the length of those rides. Afterwards, he goes to the Chinese baths with Emir and the hot water loosens the tension in his muscles. It is almost like being in Dodge again, only his clothes fit a good deal looser, and he hasn’t as much breath.

He splashes the water at Emir, and contents himself with making the man yelp.

Christmas comes, with galas and dances and shooting contests and races. He is called upon to play at a function or two, and it feels so good to just be able to sit and play as long as wants, to have people dance around him again to the music he creates. His heart is as light as it was in Mexico, once upon a time, and he looks from the keys to the mirror on the wall, and finds Christine and Emir reflected back at him, her laughing in his arms. Emir is grinning as he spins her around the dancefloor, and it is all Erik can do not to laugh, to turn his attention back to his fingers on the keys.

He never knew it was possible, to love two people as much as he loves them. But he sees their reflections in the mirror as they turn to smile at him, sees the way Christine leans into Emir and he holds her tighter to steady her, and through the mirror he smiles back at them.

(Christmas is not the time to dwell on such things, but it comes to him that someday — maybe not as far away as he would like it to be — they will be left alone without him, and when that day comes he is sure they will be very happy together. It is a comfort to think that neither of them will ever have to be alone again.)

Someone trades with him midway through the night, some young man (and he does not feel vain thinking it) who is only three-quarters as good a player as he is. He gets a fresh glass of whiskey, and the burn of it eases the pain deep in his lungs, and then Christine is there, and he takes her into his arms.

He is not up to much in the way of dancing, and this he has no trouble admitting to himself. But he holds her close as they sway to the music, and closes his eyes as he nuzzles into her hair, and thinks, privately, that the next year will surely be better to them than the last one.

* * *

 

Christine plays two songs at the New Year gala, and he dances both of them with Emir. It leaves him breathless and laughing and if he could he would kiss him now for the world to see, but he contents himself with squeezing his hands, and kissing Christine when she relinquishes the piano to someone else.

They take their leave early, citing that he is exhausted, and are back in their rooms before midnight. They ring in 1881 lying together on their bed, still dressed in their clothes from the gala, and as the clock in the square tolls the new year, Emir and Christine each kiss his cheek.

The lump that comes to his throat is inexplicable, and he musters a watery smile for them as he raises their hands to his lips, and kisses them gently.

“I hope you know,” he whispers, “that I love you both very much.”

There are tears in Christine’s eyes, and Emir is blinking fast, as they each wrap their arms around him.

“We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Emir whispers.

* * *

 

Spring comes to Tucson. He relinquishes the use of his cane. He has almost as much stamina as he did before his haemorrhages but the loss of lung tissue leaves a toll of breathlessness that he will never recover. Lung tissue, once cavitated, is gone forever, and he is as well as he can be expected to be, and better than he thought he would be.

He has regained the strength of his legs, and that’s the important thing.

The buzzword, as it has been for several years now, is Tombstone, and the silver mines. Where there is silver there are men willing to part with dollars, and men who will need music. If it had not been for his illness they might have gone on long ago. As it is, he thinks the time has come to travel on.

Besides, word has it there’s a Chickering Square Grand in the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

He’s played many good pianos in his life (and some that were barely passable, and two that were truly great) but he’s promised himself he’ll play a Chickering Square Grand before he dies.

* * *

 

It is a two day ride to Tombstone, and he has no intention of staying long. Trouble has arisen over the robbery of the Benson stage, and where there is trouble he does not usually enjoy. He did, after all, leave the country to escape the war.

A week, he decides, should be long enough.

They book themselves into the Cosmospolitan Hotel, a man and his wife, and their traveling companion in the next room, and decide themselves that they will swap which of the two rooms they will actually sleep in each night.

(He doesn’t like sleeping without Emir at his side, even for the sake of pretenses.)

The first thing he attends to is the piano, which is everything he’d heard it would be and has a little banjo in the tone.

On their second afternoon, he is lying back in an armchair as Christine plays Chopin (her Chopin is lovely, and Emir has gone in pursuit of a good card game) when a man joins them.

He is tall, though not as tall as Erik (so very few are) and leans heavy on a cane. His hair might have been blond once, but is now shot through with grey, and his cough is that of a fellow sufferer.

(There is something vindictively satisfying, about seeing a man who is probably younger than he is bearing the disease worse.)

The man settles in the neighboring armchair, and offers Erik a slim cigar, but Erik gave up smoking when it started aggravating his lungs, so he shakes his head.

The man lights one for himself, and nods towards Christine.

“She’s a remarkable player,” he says, and Erik can’t keep the smile from his lips.

“My wife.” And it is not quite a lie.

* * *

 

They stay in Tombstone two weeks, and get out before trouble can brew. Then it is back to Tucson and after that, wherever their horses will bring them.

* * *

 

Emir has always been something of an artist, even in Mexico. He doesn’t keep many of the portraits he makes, and Erik fancies there are probably hundreds of likenesses of him scattered throughout the West, of him at the piano and at cards and on horseback (all of them only ever the good half of his face). By now there must be dozens, too, of Christine, and of him with Christine. There is something endearing about the sight of Emir sitting with his sketchbook and lead, tracing out the lines of his face, and as it was endearing nineteen years ago when they first met, it is just as endearing now.

He does landscapes and couples and dances and cowmen and anyone willing to pay him to sketch a portrait of them. It is cheaper to have Emir make a portrait than it is to go to a photographer, and Emir is very good.

So long were they in Tucson that Emir gathered up a nice bundle of money, and it carries them on their journeys through 1881, even going so far as to buy laudanum, for those times that the pain in Erik’s chest demands it.

(Personally he is not a fan of laudanum. It slows his brain and his fingers and muddies his thoughts, and it may have come from opium but there is nothing of the comfort of opium in it.)

Christine only ever takes a little of it, when the cramps of her time insist on it.

(The early summer of 1881 is the first time that he touches her after losing the baby. He was not well enough to think about such things and when he was he did not want to hurt her, and some part of him was afraid that he might cause another baby and the same pain again, but he voiced these thoughts to Emir one night who told him he was being ridiculous, that she had recovered long before he had and when he had never hurt her before he would not now, and if he did cause another baby well, that was the way of all things, wasn’t it? Emir gives them space the next night, off sketching under the moonlight, and Erik takes Christine into his arms and lies with her, and with her touch upon his skin all his worries evaporate.)

He wins a chess game in Prescott that goes on all night and into the early dawn, and it reminds him of just how ill he has been when he can barely rise at the end for the weakness in his legs. Christine steadies him with a hand on his arm, and gathers his winnings (three thousand dollars, enough to last them a very long time) even as Emir buys drinks for everyone in the room to distract them.

There is a race in Salt Lake where he places second, and would have won if he hadn’t coughed as they hit the line, and been thrown just as they cross it. It tears adhesions in his chest and he coughs blood all night but there is no haemorrhage.

(Both Christine and Emir has refused to support his entering in the race, and part of why he did it was to spite them for hovering over him so. But as he lay in bed afterwards coughing blood and unable to talk, he saw the worry in their eyes and terrible guilt washed through him. His life is not his own, and he loves them all the more that they do not say, _I told you so_.)

They settle back into a comfortable rhythm for the rest of the year, and Erik’s condition remains stable so long as he is careful to rest, and the dawn of 1882 finds all three of them dancing slowly together in a town with barely a name.

He kisses his two loves as the bells toll outside, and feels hopeful for more easy years ahead.

(It is a delusion, but he is not ready to let himself know that.)

* * *

 

The events that lead to them riding across most of Utah in the summer of 1882 are something that he will never remember much of, but it is enough to know that for the second time in his life he killed a man to protect someone he loves, only this time it was Christine and not Emir.

The need to escape the territory is so great that he cannot rest and even the hours of night as they lie together beneath the stars feel like a waste when they could be riding further to safety. He knows there is something gone wrong deep in his chest before the morning he gags on blood and slips from his horse but he has not let himself think on it and after that he is too busy with the business of trying to breathe around the pain and bleeding.

He passes out and wakes to darkness and stars, to Christine cradling him close and singing softly to him, to burning in his chest and the heaviness of laudanum on the back of his tongue. He gags and chokes and gasps and she shushes him and kisses his hair and after that he doesn’t know much of anything at all for a long time.

When he does come back to himself, he is on a horse and there is someone behind him, their arm around him, and he looks up through bleary eyes to Christine’s face, her jaw set and hard, framed by the blue sky, but he hasn’t the strength to let her know he is awake, and closes his eyes again against the brightness.

With the rocking motion of the horse beneath him, he mostly sleeps.

Nights he wakes shivering and ill even with Christine and Emir both pressed close.

Sometimes he wakes on horseback and it is Emir’s face he sees above him, Emir’s arm he feels holding him close, but he never tells either of them he is awake.

It is easier, just to sleep and know they are close by.

He never wakes alone.

* * *

 

He spends a great deal of time in 1883 dwelling on the question of marrying Christine. They are married in every way except name only, and it would not take so very long to sign their name to papers attesting their love and fidelity. He loves her so very much, and there is not much he can do to show her that, but he could marry her.

If she ever thinks about it, she never mentions it.

In the end, he decides against it. If he married Christine, it would not be fair to Emir, and he loves them both so very much that he could not bear to do something that would not be fair.

(He does, briefly, consider suggesting that they marry each other. After all, barring some terrible and unforeseen disaster they will both outlive him. He thinks about it, but never suggests it. To say such a thing would only upset them.)

* * *

 

He turns forty-seven in April ’84. His hair is grey and something about it reminds him of his father, and leaves his face familiar.

Emir makes a portrait of the three of them together, and with the music Christine plays (a composition of her own, that she has worked on in secret) it is the best gift he could ever be given.

* * *

 

Leadville is an upsetting, inhospitable sort of town. He dislikes it on sight even before he realises the air is full of mining dust and no good at all for his lungs.

He meets a gambler, a fellow sufferer, formerly a dentist, who is familiar from somewhere. Maybe Fort Griffin or maybe Tombstone (actually both, time has been no kinder to John Henry Holliday than it has been to Erik) but there is nothing unusual about that. Consumptives and gamblers follow similar trails, and it is not unusual that they find themselves together.

They decide to stay a week, just long enough for Erik to rest a bit. There isn’t a single good piano in town, but he and Christine make do with what they’ve got.

In the end, they have to leave before the week is up. Emir gets himself in trouble with a card game, and it is a relief to leave Leadville behind.

* * *

 

His hands tremble just enough now that he doesn’t trust himself to be able to shave without doing himself an injury. Emir doesn’t trust him either, and Emir’s hands are gentle, tilting his head this way and that to better catch the light, a look of great concentration on his face, the sort he gets over long card games and delicate portraits, and there is something about seeing that look directed at _him_ that makes Erik’s heart falter.

Christine watches them with a soft look on her face, and hums to herself.

* * *

 

He dances, slowly, with Emir in a saloon that even the bartender has left for the night. Christine plays the Emperor for them, and soft nocturnes, and there is a terrible lump in his throat to think that there are only so many more times he can do this, so many more times that he will be well enough to do this, and he doesn’t want to leave them, he doesn’t want to. There is nothing in the world he wants less than to be pulled away from them but he has no say in it. Someday not that far away he will die and leave them and it’s not fair.

It’s not fair.

He kisses Emir and there are tears on both of their cheeks, and Christine finishes the piece and wraps her arms around them, and for a long time they stand there, just stand there all three of them, holding each other, and pretending they are not crying.

(He has three years left, just about. But he has no way of knowing that, and he is so tired.)

* * *

 

The night Christine sleeps with the ballerina in Deadwood, he wakes in the darkness to Emir’s soft breathing beside him, and the other side of the bed is empty.

His heart drops to realize she is not there. She is always there, always. Every night and every morning and every time he wakes with a pain in his chest or a creak in his bones to cough. He cannot remember a time since she came into his life that she has not been there, and his stomach churns with nausea.

He has been ill, terribly so. Pneumonia, not for the first time, but this time it almost did for him. (He dimly remembers waking, blood caught in his throat, to the feel of Emir’s body behind him propping him up, to knuckles rubbing his chest, to muttered curses and pleas in the eastern languages and when he coughed and gagged and sucked in a lungful of air that burned in his chest his eyes fluttered open and Christine was there, her face so pale. Emir murmured something to him, voice thick with tears, but he was too tired to hear it and the darkness washed over him again, and even now he is not sure if it was real or not.) He is too tired to stay awake for more than a little while, too sore to move much from the bed, too breathless to say much of anything at all, and if she’s left—

If she’s left, he can hardly blame her. Why should someone as beautiful and lovely as her bind herself to a dying old man like him?

He would not love her any less, if she decided to leave. If it was what she thought was best.

Tears well in his eyes and he tries to blink them away, tries to swallow against the lump in his throat, but the tears keep coming and the lump makes it so hard to breathe, and he has to get up or he’ll upset Emir and then Emir will get upset that he’s upset and it wouldn’t do at all.

He braces himself and slowly, carefully, rolls out of bed.

His chest heaves against the change in position but he fights the cough that tries to come. He will not cough now, dammit, not now when she’s left and his coughing would wake Emir.

This time, for once, he wins, and he bites his lip as he pushes himself to his feet. His legs are tottering and weak beneath him, but he makes it to the window, and opens the drapes.

The first hint of brightness is in the distance.

It is closer to morning than he thought.

The tears come fresh and hot, and he braces himself against the window frame, and lets them roll as they will.

* * *

 

It is Emir who pulls him back from the window, Emir who puts him to bed, nestles him amongst his pillows with the extra ones to his back to take the pressure off his lungs. “She’ll be back,” he whispers, drying the tears from Erik’s face. “She’ll be back, I promise.”

And he is so certain, so certain that Christine will return that fresh tears well in Erik’s eyes again.

“Do you want laudanum?”

No, he doesn’t want laudanum. Laudanum will fog his thoughts and take the edge off the pain in his heart but he needs the pain, he needs it. He shakes his head, but Emir gives him that hard look.

“I think you should take the laudanum.”

So he takes the laudanum, a strong dose bitter on his tongue, and sleep is muffled and quiet.

Far away, at one point, he hears voices, half-wakes to the creaking of the bed, and arms coming around him, but the drug drags him back down, and when at last he does wake, the evening light is soft suffusing the room, and Emir is nowhere to be found.

Christine’s face is damp against his neck. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and he draws her closer to him, and kisses her hair.

“Don’t be,” he whispers, with what breath he can muster. “Don’t be.”

(They never speak of it again.)

* * *

 

He still makes an effort, every town they come to, to play the piano. Sometimes his fingers are too stiff to find the notes, and he contents himself to sit beside Christine as she plays, and lay his head on top of hers, and listen, just listen to the notes. Chopin’s mazurkas, and they wend their way into his bones.

He gives up playing cards. His hands and his head are both too slow.

He dances with Christine, swaying with her in his arms, as 1885 becomes 1886, and then takes Emir into his arms, for the barest handful of moments, before he has too sit. He is so tired, all of the time, but there is never a moment that he is not happy to have them at his side, and afterwards, as they walk home (haltingly slowly, to give him time) he takes a fit of laughter that leaves him breathless and weak and they support him the rest of the way home as he kisses each beloved cheek in turn and whispers to them that he does love them, he loves them very much, and he hopes they know that and never have a moment to doubt it.

(He is quite drunk. The pain in his chest has been terrible, and he has taken a lot of whiskey for it, but the words are true nonetheless.)

They put him to bed and hold him.

He turns forty-nine in April 1886 and it is the last time he is strong enough to dance with either of them.

He still plays the piano every time he can, but the times are growing further and further apart.

* * *

 

It is the summer of 1886 that Christine kills a man, and for what is left of his life Erik will feel guilty over it. His memory of it is hazy, only that he was attacked and he couldn’t breathe, his face was cold and there was blood in the dirt and then the blood wasn’t just what he was coughing up, it was other blood too.

She stabbed the man who might have killed him.

Emir got them both out of town before they could be found.

Helena, Montana. All he remembers of leaving is the bumpy stage ride, the jolting pain in his bones, and Christine holding him close.

Emir’s hand was firm around his.

There might have been a train, at some point, too.

* * *

 

They say that mountain air is good for consumptives, that there is research coming out of Switzerland. Something about high altitudes, and the effect on the lungs. Mountain air and hot springs, and so they come to Glenwood.

Even as they arrive, he suspects, deep in his bones, that he will never leave.

It is the summer of 1887. He is fifty. He has loved Emir for twenty-five years, fully half of his life, loved him even in the time they were apart (and he regrets ever having parted from him now) and loved Christine just as fiercely for the last ten.

It is 1887, and he is dying.

He wonders how it would be if the child had survived. Would it better or worse, for Christine and Emir, to have some part of him left behind? Would it be a comfort to know his blood would continue? Or would it always be worse, their baby growing up without him?

He has never known much regret. Perhaps he is fortunate that way. But he does regret, now, the loss of the baby.

He tries not to dwell on it. Beginnings and endings, and sometimes they come together. What was there that anyone could have done?

He would write them letters, for After, but his hands tremble too much.

He has taken to wearing cravats, for the last years now, to hide the swellings in his throat. They will go to Emir.

His rings will go to Christine.

Everything else, they can divide between them. Or burn it, if they want.

Emir makes a sketch of his hands, cradled in Christine’s. It is the first time he realizes he has beautiful hands.

Emir has always been beautiful. In Mexico, and that first night they met, and even now, his hair all turned ashen.

(Erik did that to him, and there is a part of him that knows guilt over it, but it is the workings of time.)

Christine is more beautiful by the day.

He has been Erique, and Enrique. But Erik has been best, and the last ten years the best of all, even with his illness, even dying.

(He would never tell either of them, it would upset them, but if it had not been for his illness he might never have sought out Emir in Dodge and never loved Christine and he suspects he owes what he has to his illness, but there is something disturbing in thinking that.)

Christine hums songs to him, and sings softly, and kisses the corner of his mouth, afraid of overexciting him, but he is past being over excited. Sometimes she kisses him fully on the mouth, and it is sweeter than ever.

Emir kisses his forehead, and his hands, and his mouth.

He kisses them both, when he has the strength to.

There is pneumonia, in late September, and when he comes back to himself he knows he will never leave the bed again. He is much too tired.

He just hopes they never forget how much he loves them, and has loved them.

They will be good together. They will love each other. He knows that. And it is the greatest comfort he has.

(They are both there, the last time he opens his eyes. The world is blurry, but he would know their faces anywhere. Their kisses are soft, and he gives them what he thinks is a smile, before he slips into the sleep from which he will never wake.)

The gentle touch of their hands to his forehead, to his face, follow him into the darkness.


End file.
